TERROR ALERTS: Are the ‘New Normal’ for These Officials

Living with terror threats in Germany has become the “new normal”, according to one of the country’s top policemen after a tip-off over a planned suicide bombing saw train stations in Munich evacuated on New Year’s Eve.

No-one “doubts any longer” that Germany’s citizens should get used to the risk of an attack, Andy Neumann of the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation has warned, saying that only a mixture of luck and skill has so far kept the country safe from a large Islamic extremist atrocity.

“In some cases it was pure luck, which also often lay in the inability of the attacker,” Mr Neumann told newspaper Die Welt.

“In other cases it was the right information at the right time, followed by several months of complex investigation. That luck will someday surely also run out – so it is all the more important to remain vigilant.”

However, he urged people to go about their everyday lives as normal, saying: “Anything else would be grist to the mill of those who would rather have us living in fear.”

A suicide bomb threat by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) led to machine gun-toting police officers evacuating two of the city’s busiest train stations at 11pm on New Year’s Eve.